Willard Van Orman Quine was an American logician and philosopher who counts among the most influential analytic philosophers of the twentieth century. He taught at Harvard University (1936–1978). His contribution to the book lies in the radicalization of Duhem’s theory holism: Quine shows that the totality of human knowledge forms a web “which impinges on experience only along the edges” — with far-reaching consequences for the claims of scientism.
Key Contribution: Two Dogmas of Empiricism
In Two Dogmas of Empiricism (1951), Quine attacks two cornerstones of Logical Positivism:
1. The Analytic-Synthetic Distinction
The sharp boundary between conceptual truths (analytic: “All bachelors are unmarried”) and truths of fact (synthetic: “It is raining”) cannot, according to Quine, be upheld. Every attempt to define “analytic” presupposes concepts that themselves stand in need of clarification.
2. Reductionism
The thesis that every meaningful statement can be reduced to data of experience founders on holism: statements never face the tribunal of experience in isolation, but always only in conjunction with the entire edifice of knowledge.
Confirmation Holism
Quine’s famous image: the totality of our knowledge is “a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges.” Logic and mathematics form the center of the web, empirical statements the periphery. A confrontation with experience does not compel the abandonment of particular sentences, but only a reordering of the entire structure.
Quine thereby radicalizes Duhem’s holism, which was confined to physics, into the Duhem-Quine thesis: the holism of all cognition.
Significance for the Critique of Naturalism
Quine himself was a naturalist — he advocated a naturalized epistemology that understands the theory of cognition as part of empirical psychology. Yet the consequences of his own thesis undermine this naturalism:
- If no statement is empirically testable in isolation, then the naturalist thesis “only empirical knowledge counts” is itself not purely empirically justifiable.
- The choice between competing theories requires criteria such as simplicity, coherence, and fruitfulness — criteria that are not empirical findings, but expressions of the rationality of the knowing subject.
Plantinga shows in his Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism that Quine’s naturalized epistemology cancels itself out: if our cognitive faculties were selected only for adaptive behavior, there is no reason to credit them with a capacity for truth.
Place in the Book
Quine’s holism supplies — unintentionally — a strong argument for the position of the ontology of personhood: philosophy is no superfluous speculation alongside natural science, but belongs to the indispensable core of the web of knowledge. The question of personhood cannot be excluded from science by an appeal to falsifiability.
Sources: Bexten 2017, pp. 44–47 (the modern concept of science).
Further sources:
- Quine, Willard Van Orman (1951): “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”. In: The Philosophical Review 60(1), pp. 20–43.
- Quine, Willard Van Orman (1960): Word and Object. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
- Harding, Sandra G. (ed.) (1976): Can Theories Be Refuted? Essays on the Duhem-Quine Thesis. Synthese Library 81. Dordrecht: Reidel.